PossessedHand controls hand with electrical stimuli

[Emi Tamaki], [Miyaki Takashi] and [Jun Rekimoto] at the University of Tokyo came up with a device called the PossessedHand that electrically stimulates muscles to train someone to play a the koto, a Japanese stringed instrument.

The PossessedHand ‘triggers’ individual fingers with precisely placed electrodes. Sixteen joints in the hand can be controlled independently by placing one electrode on the muscle that controls the joint and a ground electrode on the tendon of that muscle. Users of the PossessedHand reported no pain from the device when 30 Volts were sent though the electrodes.

The paper (PDF warning) goes into detail about the reactions of the users of the PossessedHand. While a few subjects thought the PossessedHand was scary, many enjoyed it – one subject even thought it was possible to fly a helicopter without training. While this isn’t downloading a rotary wing licence into your brain like The Matrix, the PossessedHand did prove to be a useful tool for learning the fingering for the koto. You can see a video of the PossessedHand in action in the New Scientist story.

pipomolo42: im assuming that was meant as a joke, but got me thinking if something like that would be possible to assist in spinal injury’s? attach a device like this below the injury to stimulate things and control it with the mind…

Imagine a future civilization, in which a tyrant takes rule those who obey his evil commands he leaves alone, but all those who try to fight for liberty are arested, and have a computer installed on them that controls their every action!

Cool technology, but if it ever goes out of hand (no pun intended), it will be pretty awful!

These have already been turned into sex toys. The “Slightest Touch” is probably the tamest one, I’ll leave finding references to wilder ones up to the truly interested; as some are quite perverse and not intended strictly for pleasure. And then there’s electro-ejaculation, used on livestock to collect semen; which is designed only to be effective, not pleasurable in the least.

I used to experiment with electronic muscle stimulation (for strength/aerobic training, not for the aforementioned uses). Started with a small commercial unit, then later built one that interfaces to a parallel port, allowing a program on the computer to control eight channels. Each channel was little more than a MOSFET driving a Radio Shack audio transformer. By pulsing the MOSFET, it would generate an isolated, higher-voltage bipolar pulse on the secondary. Amplitude could be controlled with pulse width.

With that device, you could strap electrodes on some major muscles for a half-hour, and get a decent sweat-inducing workout while just sitting there, watching TV or on the computer; which is exactly what I did, many times.

But although it’s not painful, it’s a very odd and distracting sensation that most people wouldn’t consider pleasant. And since there is no closed-loop feedback, it’s a fine line between the amount of current required to produce an insufficiently small twitch, and overstimulating a muscle to the point of cramping; which gets even finer the longer you maintain continuous stimulation.

For that reason and others I gave up on it, and decided I’d rather just have a proper workout instead.

And that’s probably why these have never caught on in the mainstream, though they will always be fascinating.

ErosTek, P.E.S. and others make these. My reading indicates they can be used internally to force an electric sex toy to essentially force the body to have sex with itself by involuntarily controlling the vagina or rectum. Rather interesting idea.

Reminds me of an article on the BBC a few months back when a quadriplegic man started walking (all be it rather slowly) after a few days use of a similar device. it was applied to the spinal column and was suppose to trigger regeneration of the nerve tissue.

@Stevie – nice idea, however sign languages are natural languages in their own right, not just a different way of representing a spoken language. There is, for example, no one-to-one correspondence between the grammar and words of ASL and English. Sign languages develop and grow independently of spoken languages, and there are even distinct dialects within sign languages. That doesn’t mean it isn’t doable, but it would require significant natural language processing as there is with translations between say English and French, and all the same issues of changes in what the correct word is based on the context.

i think this technology can be used with the military combined with an enemy detection system camera or sumtin it would be able to pull the trigger faster than any of the best marksman.. lol like a triggerbot from counterstrike.